Perhaps We Left at the Right Time

Before we left the US for Canada, we par­tic­i­pated in some war protests. In 2003, Pam and I marched, along with thou­sands of other Bosto­ni­ans, against the Iraq war. We had been against the war from day 1, and were par­tic­u­larly upset that our niece (who we had rec­om­mended the US Mil­i­tary as a great place to get free health care and col­lege fund­ing, back in the saner Clin­ton era) was actu­ally sta­tioned in Kirkuk. So one over­cast day in March, we marched from Boston Com­mon to some­where else in the city (I can’t remem­ber where). The march was peace­ful, and there were no arrests.

It appears that this past week, accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent Media Cen­ter of Win­nipeg:

In one of his most chill­ing moves to date against his own cit­i­zens, the Amer­i­can War Leader has issued a sweep­ing order this week out­law­ing all forms of protest against the Iraq war. Pres­i­dent Bush enacted into US law an ‘Exec­u­tive Order’ on July 17^th titled “Block­ing Prop­erty of Cer­tain Per­sons Who Threaten Sta­bi­liza­tion Efforts in Iraq”, and which says:

“By the author­ity vested in me as Pres­i­dent by the Con­sti­tu­tion and the laws of the United States of Amer­ica, includ­ing the Inter­na­tional Emer­gency Eco­nomic Pow­ers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emer­gen­cies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and sec­tion 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, George W. Bush, Pres­i­dent of the United States of Amer­ica, find that, due to the unusual and extra­or­di­nary threat to the national secu­rity and for­eign pol­icy of the United States posed by acts of vio­lence threat­en­ing the peace and sta­bil­ity of Iraq and under­min­ing efforts to pro­mote eco­nomic recon­struc­tion and polit­i­cal reform in Iraq and to pro­vide human­i­tar­ian assis­tance to the Iraqi peo­ple, it is in the inter­ests of the United States to take addi­tional steps with respect to the national emer­gency declared in Exec­u­tive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Exec­u­tive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for addi­tional steps taken in Exec­u­tive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Exec­u­tive Order 13364 of Novem­ber 29, 2004.“

While IMC-Winnipeg does sound a lit­tle shrill, it is arguable that polit­i­cal protests like the ones that we par­tic­i­pated in are now against the law, and we (along with every­body else) would now be rounded up and thrown in jail. Accord­ing to the rules of this law we would be for­bid­den from talk­ing about it with any­one, includ­ing lawyers or the press (who might very well paint us as ‘peo­ple who hate Amer­ica’ if they were from Fox)

Lately I’ve seen a lot of spec­u­la­tion online that the US is just one ‘inci­dent’ away from Mar­tial Law, sug­gest­ing that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is putting in place the tools to actu­ally avoid the next elec­tion and stay in power due to a ‘National Emer­gency’. Whether that inci­dent was real or actu­ally a staged event has also been men­tioned. I would have dis­missed this as alarmist imag­i­na­tions run wild, but they keep crop­ping up.

I can’t help think­ing that if there were such an event, with pub­lic protests being ille­gal (or cast as ‘under­min­ing efforts to pro­mote eco­nomic recon­struc­tion and polit­i­cal reform in Iraq’), the pos­si­bil­ity of this def­i­n­i­tion being expanded to include: “and inter­fer­ing with the US government’s attempts to restore order” or some­thing sim­i­lar is not inconceivable.